United Nations

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said last week on World Press Freedom Day that "freedom of expression, independent media and universal access to knowledge will fortify our efforts to achieve lasting results for people and the planet," Pakistan's The Nation reports. The secretary general also criticized attacks on journalists.

Development groups have called upon the United Nations to make media freedom and access to information central to the global body's sustainable development agenda, according to The Guardian. Some advocates prefer a "distinct global development plan on good governance, with access to information at its heart." The argument, Thomas Hughes opines in The Guardian, is that "quality, current and accessible information is crucial to establishing the scope and nature of development challenges. It empowers people to hold their leaders to account and participate in the decisions that affect their lives. It also forms the basis of a free and independent media, which, as media development NGOs such as Internews have emphasised, plays a vital role in safeguarding development. A free media informs, facilitates public participation through open debate and helps to hold those in power to account."

The U.S. Senate has not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, including a vote in December 2012 that failed by five votes, The Interdependent reports. The convention was modeled after the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. The Senate likely will consider the convention again this year, The Interdependent further reports.

"Both U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and Secretary [of State John] Kerry have argued that the treaty’s benefits occur not through changing any U.S. laws or even spending U.S. resources, but rather by encouraging other countries to follow U.S. leadership in terms of the ADA—legislation that is widely recognized as among the world’s highest standards for protecting the rights of the disabled," The Interdependent also notes.

Navi Pillay, the United Nations human rights chief who has been asked by the international membership organization to prepare a report on protection of the right to privacy, said that international action led to the end of apartheid in South Africa and that it can again lead to the end of massive surveillance of online activity, The Guardian reports. The experience of international action on apartheid "inspires me to go on and address the issue of internet [privacy], which right now is extremely troubling because the revelations of surveillance have implications for human rights … People are really afraid that all their personal details are being used in violation of traditional national protections," Pillay said.

The United Nations has called on countries, including the United States, which use drone strikes for counterterrorism purposes to comply with international law, The Dawn, a newspaper in Pakistan, reports. The resolution was sponsored by Pakistan.

It is the first time the United Nations has spoken on the issuse of remote-controlled drones, The Dawn reprots.

The United Nations adopted a resolution, sponsored by Brazil and Germany in the wake of the revelation that the United States was eavesdropping on leaders in those countries, supporting the protection of Internet privacy, the BBC reports. The non-binding resolution affirms that '"the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online,'" the BBC further reports.

The hope of such non-binding international measures is that they will influence international norms.

Philip Alston, writing in Just Security, asks if the United Nations let the United States off the hook regarding Internet privacy. While the language of a United Nations resolution was watered down at American urging, Alston argues that there is good news in a resolution that is set to be adopted by the full UN this month. Among other good points, "by basing itself on the formulations of the right to privacy included in both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the resolution implicitly rejects the US line that privacy rights derive only from a specific treaty which the US in turn insists has no extra-territorial implications," Alston writes. 

A United Nations committee has advanced a resolution sponsored by Brazil and Germany to make the right to privacy against unlawful surveillance applicable to anyone in the world, The Washington Post reported. The two countries sponsored the measure after revelations of monitoring  by the United States of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The resolution is expected to pass the United Nations General Assembly too, The Post further reported. While the resolution is not binding law, General Assembly resolutions " reflect world opinion and carry political weight," The Post also reported.

The largely symbolic resolution was watered down though. The Post reported: "The key compromise dropped the contention that the domestic and international interception and collection of communications and personal data, 'in particular massive surveillance,' may constitute a human rights violation."

The New York Times reports that the most recent United Nations talks on climate change made some progress: "Delegates agreed to the broad outlines of a proposed system for pledging emissions cuts and gave their support for a new treaty mechanism to tackle the human cost of rising seas, floods, stronger storms and other expected effects of global warming." However, while these climate-change negotiations weren't a Copenhagen fiasco, "treaty members remain far from any serious, concerted action to cut emissions. And developing nations complained that promises of financial help remain unmet," The Times also reports.

Both Brazil and German, which have been the subjct of American surveillance, are seeking to "apply the right to privacy, which is enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to online communications," Foreign Policy reports. The United States, however, is pushing back, "to kill a provision of the Brazilian and German draft which states that 'extraterritorial surveillance' and mass interception of communications, personal information, and metadata may constitute a violation of human rights," Foreign Policy further reports.

Separately, Reuters reports that a "draft U.N. resolution that some diplomats said suggested spying in foreign countries could be a human rights violation has been weakened to appease the United States, Britain and others ahead of a vote by a U.N. committee next week." The initial draft would have had the General Assembly declare it is "'deeply concerned at human rights violations and abuses that may result from the conduct of any surveillance of communications, including extraterritorial surveillance of communications,"' but the draft now proposes the General Assembly declare it is '"deeply concerned at the negative impact that surveillance and/or interception of communications, including extraterritorial surveillance and/or interception of communications, as well as the collection of personal data, in particular when carried out on a mass scale, may have on the exercise and enjoyment of human rights,'" according to Reuters.